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NetworkingNed writes "The new Killer NIC K1 is the successor to the much debated original Killer NIC card that offers the same features at a lower price: this time for about $170 or so. Not cheap, that's for sure. But in this review at PC Perspective, not only is the new card tested under the drastically updated Vista networking stack with improved results, but the free BitTorrent client that runs on the Killer NIC is reviewed as well; with it you should be able to download torrents without affecting online gaming performance. Enough to warrant a $175 network card?"

Yes it does. Scroll down in the PC Perspective article [pcper.com] to the FNA=Flexible Network Architecture section - it's about a page down. It talks about how the card is basically a miniature computer, running Linux.

That's the whole point of the Killer NIC : It *does run* Linux.The whole story can be broiled down to the Killer NIC being in fact a nice small router with loadbalancing/QoS/Pcket prioritizing. Plus a small server with it own mass storge pugable in USB.The Killer NIC is nothing more than a glorified router shrinked to the size of a PCI card.Once you get the basic idea there are only two quirks :- It is sold completly ready to go. Whereas/. geeks lovingly tune their traffic shaping scripts to reach optiml balance between their latency sensitive application (VoIP, interactive SSH, gaming), their bandwith critical apps (File download, file sharing) and the rest (IMing, real-time meteo, etc.), this card comes "pre-tuned" so joe six pack has only to plug it to enjoy the benefits of QoS.- As this is a PCI card and not a box that must communicated of the internet, the driver can use special hooks and directly tap into the Windows TCP/IP stack. Thus the router can sort and select packaets before they even leave the computer. Thus joe's gaming traffic gets put in front with higher priority than the traffic generated by the dozen of spywares/trojans/virus/spam zombies running in background.

Basically it's targeted to the same people who need quad-core CPUs : geeks who want to hack it, and clueless users who need to still have performance even when everthing is crawling under the load of crapware.

The Killer NIC is nothing more than a glorified router shrinked to the size of a PCI card.

no it's not. first of all, don't mix up "router" with the "broadband router" crap you buy for $20. second, any router will indeed increase your latency, while this card reduces it. it's just a network offloading engine on steroids. as no one will ever push gigabit here (because of the PCI bus limitations). so, as it has a whole lot of unused power, it can be used to run apps on it.

The Killer NIC is nothing more than a glorified router shrinked to the size of a PCI card.

You could get a very good device that was exactly that four years ago - a snapgear firewall/router on a PCI card - they are the guys that started uClinux and gave it back to us. It's been so long they were bought out twice so the current name is different.

If you're so worried about bittorrent degrading your performance, save your money - haul out that "obsolete" 1-2ghz machine and you won't have to leave your main box running (and costing electricity) when you seed.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. If you buy this card, then you deserve Everything You Deserve To Get(tm).

I'll still say that you don't need to trademark every silly thing that your card does "special". Like, "This case now with SafeCorner(tm) so that you're likely to get less BloodNStuff(tm) on your NetworkBOOST(tm)"

"I said it before, and I'll say it again. If you buy this card, then you deserve Everything You Deserve To Get(tm)."

The truth is shit like this should never be allowed to be released in the market, too many fraudulent greedy capitalists are to blame for a lot of mediocre products that take advantage of peoples ignorance.

It's not going to save any electricity. You rather have 2 boxes on while you're gaming instead of one, and while you're not gaming you still have one sucking electricity. There's no real energy savings here.But energy saving aside, it's still a good setup. Spend that 175$ on a 500GB HD, and throw it in an old lifecycled 2GHz box (with enough RAM preferably). Run all the P2P apps you want on it. Use it as NAT/firewall (DNS if you want, and filtering proxy, etc). And LAMP server. Throw MySQL/PostgreSQL/Firebi

"It's not going to save any electricity. You rather have 2 boxes on while you're gaming instead of one, and while you're not gaming you still have one sucking electricity. There's no real energy savings here.

You might game for an hour or two, and download/seed for 24 - for 22 of those hours, your main box is off and not using electricity - and its more than likely that you can run the older box headless, saving even more juice; also that the video card in the older box doesn't run as hot...

If you know what you're doing this isn't an issue. Just underclock your CPU as much as you can bring to bear (this way you can unplug the fan, saving 2 or so watts..) as a seeding server wouldn't need much CPU power at all. Then, power down/uninstall every device you aren't using (sound, video, etc). Besides, it's well worth the fact that you don't have to sleep in the heat and noise of your desktop/gaming box. Also, it means you can dump your non-boot disk (eg, media disks) in the other box and use it for

Seconded - the thermal footprint of an average P3 after replacing the disks with modern ones is in the sub-50W range. The CPU depending on the model consumes 18-27W at max utilisation, disks are at most 10W each and peripherals rack up 10W or so on top of that. This is comparable to the thermal footprint of a 1GHz+ mini-ITX which is about as low as you can get with modern x86 hardware.

Compared to that a modern gaming capable system runs happily into the 400W+ territory. Even with all the advances in power saving modes on the peripherals and the CPU you are likely to find running an old P3 for router/firewall/P2P/file server/etc considerably more efficient compared to allocating these resources on your "main" box.

The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.

The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.

I just checked three very popular parts sites and in the space of a couple minutes found about three dozen fans that will fit S370. Hardly "challenging".

Old PSUs are sometimes amazingly inefficient, especially at lower loads, that you might be lucky to get 50% efficiency. So you're got to double your (conservative) estimates for real-world usage. Don't go by the numbers - the only way is to use a kill-a-watt or equivalent and measure typical usage over a few days, then normalise.

If you have a gaming machine, you probably don't even care about electricity (especiall as low-end machine with integrated graphics will need a fraction of power used by a monster with an overclocked Athlon-FX X2 and a SLI nvidia 8800 setup).

And gamer's parents typically don't know how much power a PC can consume:)

Amen. I've got my own via Nehemiah low power based server with a few hard disks attatched & 512 MB of RAM. On it I run subversion server/apache/torrentflux/samba/imap so it's pretty much my personal server for everything and it only costs a few hundred bucks to put together in total.Advantage of this is that you don't need to run you pc 24/7 and your resources aren't drained. Not to mention the fact that I can access my mail & initiate bittorent downloads anywhere on the planet from my smartphone.

There are dozens of specialized Linux distributions on distrowatch designed for this purpose. Toss the disk in the old system, toss in the CD, format the drives and you're done. FreeNAS comes to mind, but I don't know if it has a BT client preinstalled.

Not really - the switch will examine the first few bytes in the packet, then route it. Its called "cut-and-forward", as opposed to grabbing the whole packet and then forwarding it - "store-and-forward". The switch can always figure out from the first 7 bytes (and usually less) which port to forward to. You won't notice a few nano-seconds.

99% of Ethernet switches on the market are store-and-forward, and cut-and-forward switches fall back to store-and-forward under heavy load anyway.

In short, you'd spend $1-2k to get a switch that does cut-and-forward instead of store-and-forward, and shave at most 0.6 ms or so off of your latency for 100Base-T. (Less if your game doesn't send packets at the 1500 byte MTU, which I think most games don't, as they don't need to send that much data at a time.)

For example, I think the VOIP gateway possibilities are intreguing. Among other things, if it is managed really well, you ought to be able to do SIP connections etc withot worrying about IRQ's while the vital CPU time is spent on the TDM cards' DSP.

I know TCP offloading is one thing that a lot of people recommend with higher-traffic Asterisk instances too.

I doubt it is necessary for a home computer but could have a lot of other nice applications.

While the Killer NIC can't really improve your (client) network's latency to the host network, they can lower the "effective" latency with two methods. First, the LLR technology makes sure that your OS and networking card do not add any unnecessary latency into the game.

This sounds a bit like the difference between USB and Firewire, if I am reading the article correctly. The Killer NIC carries traffic without burdening the OS. It seems like this has possibilities above and beyond gaming. NICE.

Like running a bittorrent client.Which could even run while the computer is off.(Network cards are powered by the WOL connector. And the storage could easily be a USB stick pluged into the card's port).

The Killer NIC carries traffic without burdening the OS. It seems like this has possibilities above and beyond gaming. NICE.

Well, UDP traffic is rather important for all of us who use NFS heavily. I haven't seen any Linux drivers for it, though (that doesn't mean they don't exist).

But a NIC with a CPU and memory that offloads the CPU and increases speed isn't new at all -- the existing cards just haven't been hyped up as much. The real question here is how the KillerNIC holds up t

Another good question is how it, being 100 Mbps, will hold up compared to 1000 Mbps solutions. Since you can get a decent Intel Gigabit NIC for four machines plus a Gigabit switch for the same price as this one card, that's definitely a valid question.

That's a good point. However, for most home users, I would suspect that it would. Simply because the bottleneck (or rate-determining step, if you will) isn't their internal network or even the router but rather their cable modem. Sure, a home gigabit netw

Sure, a home gigabit network would be faster, but once it hit the router it'd all be the same, right? The advantage to QoS is that it affects both internal AND (outbound) external traffic.

The problem here is how few devices between your PC and the game server will support QoS. Internet, with a few exceptions, doesn't support QoS, but is best effort. QoS is as of yet really only useful within a LAN environment. Here on the LAN, it can ensure that my wife can watch TV from a local TV-streamer without drop-

$170 for an embedded (Coldfire?) computer on a PCI card is not that much, and it could actually be useful for other tasks like monitoring, logging and administration. The on-board FPGA could also be used to offload some processing jobs, but it probably doesn't have too many gates.

In every single one of the "reviews" of this card the "reviewer" has been a complete idiot.

Having never tested a network card (except to stress the maximum bandwidth of on-board solutions), especially one with claims of gaming benefits like this, I spent a long time finding a testing method that I was comfortable with.

Why not just setup a test network with a workstation with that NIC, a test server, a sniffer and some test scripts?

You image the workstation so you can start clean with each NIC you're testing.

You use the sniffer so you can see what is actually on the wire.

You use the scripts instead of doing anything manually because you want to remove the human factor as much as possible.

Online gaming is notoriously unreliable and unrepeatable as we all should know by now. Servers can be slower or faster based on the time of day, number of users online at the time; personal ISP connections can vary based on line quality, number of users in the area online at the time; global networks can go up and down and stream traffic anywhere at any time!

YES! Those are all the reasons why you run your own test server instead of adding additional variables to a test. So, are you going to do the test correctly?

For WoW, I selected a busy server, and attempted to play at the same time during a week day to try and always have a similar traffic level.

I guess not. Even with knowing every reason NOT to do that, you went ahead anyway.

I then used FRAPS to monitor our frame rates during the online game play and used the in-game ping monitoring for each title, reported every 10 seconds or so to another person writing the answers down. Each test was run 10 TIMES; nope, not kidding here. I wanted to be VERY sure that our results weren't a fluke, in either the Killer NIC's favor or not.

So what I'm wondering is why haven't we seen any REAL evaluations by people who know what they're doing? Do the Killer NIC people simply refuse to provide hardware to anyone who has a clue?

The on-board networking on the 975XBX2 motherboard was used for the non Killer NIC tests.

So you didn't even bother to test against a mid-range card? You used the chip on your motherboard.

Here is the torrent FNApp at work! You can see I have four files being downloaded at one time, though only two are transferring at the time. One of the things I wish BigFoot Networks had included was a transfer rate and maybe a way to see what you are actually uploading.

That's why you would use a sniffer.

In Day of Defeat: Source, I saw a 5% frame rate increase when using the Killer NIC versus the on-board networking on the Intel 975XBX2 motherboard.

And, once again, you didn't even go out and pick up a $50 NIC to compare it against.

The game did "feel" a bit faster, just as I reported in my testing under Windows XP, but once again, I am hesitant to put too much weight on that claim as it is such a vague and hard to verify point.

That's why you script the tests.

Under FEAR, I saw even more impressive results, especially considering that in Windows XP I saw NO change in performance.

And that didn't tell you something?

The model that supports FNApps is going to cost you around $179 retail, and Newegg.com has it for sale for $178 as of this publication date.

Right and odds are he did not even bother to make sure the motherboard NIC was a real NIC. You don't see it in server boards much yet thank goodness but lots of desktops have sudo NICs which do most of their work in software. That could explain those 5% frame rate jumps right there. I suspect you'd get that improvement with ANY real NIC, no need for your $50 mid range, an old NE2000 would likely deliver.

Also even midrange NICs can be capable of collecting a set of packets before interrupting, onboard NICs hardly ever does that, so you will get more interrupts, thus context shift and thus lower performance. But as others has pointed out the guy doing the review has no clue what he is doing - but that should match pretty well with the people buying it, so it might be a win-win situation.

So what I'm wondering is why haven't we seen any REAL evaluations by people who know what they're doing? Do the Killer NIC people simply refuse to provide hardware to anyone who has a clue?

No, they are just not interested. The people who understand what they are doing completly dismiss the card, and consider it as joke.In fact it can do nothing good for them. This card have only two target audience:- Joe six-packs, whose computer have become huge virus hideouts, pumping so much spam up to the point that th

I've installed plenty of drivers for on-board NICs. So far, just about every Gigabit chipset contained "Hardware Checksumming" or some veriance to offload "TCP/IP Tx and Rx". Suck examples include Intel, Broadcom, and Marvell. I'm not sure, but I think Realtek provides this function too.

If you have a 100Mbit NIC, there's a very good chance it doesn't have this feature unless it's Broadcom or Intel based.

Just get one of these [theinquirer.net]. An external hard drive with built-in wireless networking and a built-in bittorrent client. No computer needed to download.

Set it up, let it leach off of an unsecured wireless network until the owner catches on, then switch to another one. No DMCA letters (at least not to YOUR door), and gaming performance on *your* network won't suffer at all!

Yes, that's bad in several ways. But it's still an interesting/funny thought!

First, they'd have to figure out what was going on. That eliminates 99.9% of the people with unsecured wireless. Then, they'd have to actually call the police. That eliminates 90% of the.1% left. Then the police would actually have to care enough to do something about it, which drops the figure by another 99%. Those are the kinds of odds of winning a lottery, I think.

Seriously. Some time ago, my credit card number was used to call porn lines. On the statement, it had nu

This card wasn't designed with the common slashdotter in mind. We have well tuned linux routers that do QoS and filtering, we have older machines running the torrents and other services 24/7 consuming less power and producing less noise, while our main rig is a screaming NO2-cooled behemoth that dims the lights every time it switches contexts.The average twit gamer doesn't have all that. They pawned their "old" P4 for 50 bucks to put down on their $200 X-Fi Ultimate, and THAT made such a "huge" difference

I've always wondered if there was a world-wide conspiracy with NICs and key points on the net. Naturally, if you wanted to analyze all traffic that existed (yes, yes... imagine the CPU power required for that!) the place one would start would be the NIC!

I'm just referring to packets that are tagged, and when the packets are tagged as such, the NIC effectively ignores them if not specifically destined for its MAC (making same packets impossible to detect even with a hub and another box with a same nic). One could have NICs send out detailed, compressed data concerning addresses and ports, and perhaps even a complete duplicate dump of data being sent to a specific host, if requested remotely.

Now sure, this is the ultimate in paranoia. First, you would require complete complacency on the part of those designing NIC chips, and in many cases this is even done by contracted IC Design firms. There are just too many people involved to have some form of high level conspiracy, allowing for the ultimate in government control.

However, we now have a NIC that is effectively a machine of its own, making it inordinately simple for all sorts of black hat shenanigans. Even if one were to trust the company, a card like this, if exploitable remotely, would be great to set up a nice little monitoring station and even a spam relay on. How would you detect it, if you're a simple user and you don't have another Linux box or firewall to detect the traffic outgoing? Firewalls are also effectively useless (unless in a locked down state that few put them in) once a box is allowed access to NAT. There are simple ways to punch holes through firewall, and using NAT, keep them open with little traffic.

Of course, one could also just phone home every few hours anyhow.

Frankly, while I *like* real hardware NICs, I at least trust that Intel's 100% hardware NIC is going to be relatively unexploitable. It's a single purpose device, so you're not going to be (I hope!) easily loading a trojan on there.

This thing however? It sounds like you could load anything on that "NIC".

Stay away. We don't even know anything about this *company*, let alone it's security review process for the software running the NIC.

Yes, I can see how there could be problems, but it isn't any different from a router. Most routers that I know of are fairly powerful devices. They run the same risks as this card as far as exploits go.

Yes, but most routers aren't designed by some team of "dudes" in a basement somewhere, selling snake oil.Frankly, I wouldn't buy some no-name, discount router either. I'll stick with the big names, or at least names I know and can trust, or from companies that I see handle security issues. Unfortunately, many of the stores selling this discount crap should be shot... I have no faith that a router without any reasonable documentation, and without and real mention of how to get to the homepage, is going to

I'm just referring to packets that are tagged, and when the packets are tagged as such, the NIC effectively ignores them if not specifically destined for its MAC (making same packets impossible to detect even with a hub and another box with a same nic). One could have NICs send out detailed, compressed data concerning addresses and ports, and perhaps even a complete duplicate dump of data being sent to a specific host, if requested remotely.

How would you hide this data from routers? Routers have to copy packets received on one NIC and send them out another NIC. If the NIC doesn't report such packets to the host doing the routing, how will the host know to resend the data? Keep in mind that many routers are not the little pre-built boxes, and some of those that are commercial routers run customized open source software. I use a regular PC running Linux as a router, and if you ever use "connection sharing" on Windows you're using your PC a

First, keep in mind I stated:"Now sure, this is the ultimate in paranoia. First, you would require complete complacency on the part of those designing NIC chips, and in many cases this is even done by contracted IC Design firms. There are just too many people involved to have some form of high level conspiracy, allowing for the ultimate in government control."

Second, yes... Linux and other open sauce variants make this inordiantely difficult. However, imagine a world where Linux did not appear? All it wou

like the 570, or 590 amd or 590 or 680 intel as they have build it tcp/ip offloading at full gig-e speeds. This card can't hit full gig-e speed with it's pci bus also how does it hold up with a pci sound card on the pci bus?Other that have tested it with nforce boards have seen little to no differences in fps or ping and say the cost is way to high for what it does.also new boards only have 1 or 2 pci slots and you may only have 1 free after you put in 1 or 2 big video cards and most people will want to hav

Thanks for posting. There is no 'official' planned PCI-E version of the Killer NIC as of yet.... (sorry). I'm the CEO and the Mad Scientist, so I'm always exploring new technology ideas though. As for PCI-E being Point-to-Point: yep it is. but it still get's mixed in at the Chipset, and mixed in with PCI traffic... (so there is still sharing if even

Yup, every thing they stamp "Gaming" on its 2x the price (or more in this case) just to RIP YOU OFF.
Box sets, RIP OFF
Gaming hardware, RIP OFF and more flimsey
CPU "G" brands on Dell hardware, RIP OFF and you arnt covered by WARRANTY for OCing anyway.
STOP paying the GAMING tax! dammit.

There are a few home-user grade routers out there that will do all of this just fine. I'm extremely impressed with the D-Link Gamer Lounge router, for instance. I didn't have to configure anything, but I can play WoW with 100 latency, be talking on Vonage, while running a.torrent at full speed and be saturating both my upload/download (for instance, OpenOffice, which was downloading at over 2MB/s on a residential line). There were no problems on the Vonage end, either. And instead of spending $175 for each

Skip the expensive NIC and make use of that old PC. Turn the old PC into a router (I used Gentoo Linux), setup some QoS, and no problem with performance (unless my ISP is having bandwidth/latency issues).

And how much does that PC cost annually to power? Let's say it's consuming a conservative 200W. It'll take 5 hours to consume a kilowatt. Let's say you pay 12 cents/kilowatt-hour. Leave it on 24/7, multiply the daily cost out annually, and you see that that this "old PC" is a most expensive folly for something this simple. You're much better off getting a low-watt (10-20W) router, upgrading the firmware, and running your QoS there.

Don't know about Windows efficiency, but with dual core chips all this seems possible in software and without adding much overhead. Clearly this NIC targets gamers, so if Windows gaming performace stays as described in the article, the card might improve latency and FPS (although, as we see, by few percent only).They seem to have a callback which sets a bit ready in userspace (i.e. in game process memory), so game doesn't have to synchronously poll for data. This is also possible to do with on-board NIC's,

The client will most likely work fine on public torrent sites but I would hesitate to purchase this card if most of the torrents I am downloading are private. The majority of private trackers ban obscure clients, rendering the Killer NIC's strongest selling point to torrent users useless.

You can spoof the user agent but it is also possible to tell if the user agent is being spoofed. Sending challenges to the client, checking the format of their response, and seeing how the client handles the announce makes spoofing extremely difficult to an attentive tracker.
The majority of the private sites are using some form of the TBDev source and most of the ones with the user-agent ban mod block obscure clients to reduce cheating.

This is not a bad idea, but not a fix for most....People that run BitTorrents and are having performance issues is NOT always related to a generic NIC.

The fact is that most Torrent clients saturate the entire available bandwidth. So if you are running more than one computer in your house, all internet performance goes to hell on every computer because of one machine running a BitTorrent client.

This card will NOT help people like this, although it make take some of the load off the machine it is attached to.

Dave here from Bigfoot Networks, makers of the Killer NIC. I thought I'd jump on and clarify a few points that have been raised.1.) I can confirm that the Killer runs Linux. FN Torrent is the latest application designed to run on the card, along with FN Firewall. The Killer's OS is open and accessible for application development, and we provide an SDK on the install CD or via download to those who want to develop / port Linux apps for the Killer.

Yes. Yes it is. Out there are people willing to spend money on gold-plated scart connectors. I say the more overhyped, overpriced pieces of junk on the market to separate these fools and their cash the better.

ever looked at ANY PCI card? notice how the contacts are golden? notice that they don't rust? guess what. gold plated. it's just that gold plating is so overrated. a few grams of gold are enough to plate hundreds of PCI cards, so it doesn't add that much to the price of the card or connector actually. so yes, even digital interfaces benefit from gold plating (probably more than analog connections do).

the correct high end connector is the solid nickel ones. but cince the drooling masses cant understand why a dull silverish connector is better than the shiny gold one with blinking lights.... Morons buy the crap from places like monster cable.

remember, when you go to a friends house, the number of gold cables and Monster branded cables shows you how incredibly stupid he is.

Mod the parent down/off-topic if you must, but this is actually a good idea. If they could turn the technology they have here into a router that can handle large amounts of connections, maybe some wireless and programs running on it (like bittorrent), I sure as hell would buy it.

No clue why you got modded -1, it's a good question. Most consumer-grade routers suck.Look into DD-WRT or a similar "aftermarket firmware" on a compatible router. I suggest the Buffalo WHR-G54S - Cheap ($50 at Circuit City, $43 or so shipped from NewEgg) and fully compatible with DD-WRT.

The problem is not the CPU speed, but the fact that many routers have too small of an ip_conntrack table (or the equivalent if they do not run Linux). DD-WRT lets you bump up the size of that table and decrease the idle c

The "yes" and "no" tags indicate all the story headers that for some reason slashdot editors choose to end in a closed question like: Enough to warrant a $175 card? Yes using rhetorical questions is an accepted manner of getting your point across. However an open question might be even better, like "At $175, what makes this card so special?"

You make an interesting point.. or you would, if the purpose of tags were to answer arbitrary and pointless questions posted in the summary. The purpose of tags is to aid searching. Yes and no are meaningful answers; they are not functional tags.

No, that was the intended purpose of tags. Because of the way that they are implemented, what they are actually used for is to add some extra front-page editorializing. If you want to make them useful for searching purposes, then you'll have to get Slashdot to stop making it worthwhile to add moronic tags.